Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s ‘Cosby Show’ antics made me laugh as a teenager. Today, they’re a painful reminder of loss.

When audiences met Theo Huxtable, playing a high school freshman in 1984’s pilot episode of The Cosby Show, his voice was squeaky, his room was a mess, and he was pleading with his dad, Heathcliff, to stop pressuring him to get good grades.

“You’re a doctor, and mom’s a lawyer and you are both successful and everything, but maybe I’m meant to be a regular person and have a regular life,” Theo said. “Instead of acting disappointed ‘cause I’m not like you, maybe you can accept who I am and love me anyway, ‘cause I’m your son.”

I was 10 and I felt Theo’s pain.

Cliff — much like my own parents — wasn’t having it.

“I’m telling you, you are going to try as hard as you can,” Cliff (Bill Cosby) bellowed back, in the same tone my mom did when I brought home Ds in math. “And you are going to do it because I said so. I’m your father. I brought you into this world and I can take you out.”

Unlike his idealistic, flighty, bossy, and bratty sisters — Sondra, Denise, Vanessa, and Rudy — Theo evolved. In college, he learned he had dyslexia, committed to his studies, and, during the final episode, graduated from NYU.

As did I.

Theo made the hero’s journey in the Huxtable family.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the man who breathed life into Theo, drowned while swimming with his daughter at a beach along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. He was just 54 and leaves behind a wife and the 8-year-old daughter lifeguards were able to save from the riptide.

I’m not new to the death of Gen X icons. When Michael Jackson and Prince died, I mourned the legendary icons because their music was the soundtrack of my life. When Biggie and Tupac died, I was saddened that two of hip-hop’s greatest were lost to senseless gun violence. Shannen Doherty and Luke Perry (Beverly Hill’s 90210’s beloved Brenda and Dylan) were snatched away too soon.

But I didn’t see myself in them.

I was the same age as Vanessa (Tempest Bledsoe) in the show when it premiered. I grew up in New York, the daughter of hardworking parents who came of age during the civil rights era and pushed me to be excellent, just like Clair (Phylicia Rashad) and Cliff.

Warner’s death speaks to my mortality in ways that until now I never imagined. Warner is the first Cosby Show kid who has left us. “The Cosby Kids,” especially Theo, were people like us; they were peers, friends, siblings, homies.

Warner’s death comes at a time of so much loss — from the death of my father, who died in May, to the end of Sesame Street and the crumbling of the U.S. Constitution. The sadness is a lot.

Despite my disdain for Bill Cosby and his crimes, I still watch The Cosby Show on TV One. The episodes are just as fresh in my mind and life as this morning’s hot flashes. The things Theo did that made me laugh hysterically as a teenager, now fill me with tears as a grown woman — roughly the age Clair was then.

Like that time when Theo emerged in the purple and yellow designer knockoff shirt Denise made for him. The fictional designer Gordon Gartrell was a mashup of real-life designer labels Marithé Francois Gibraud and Tommy Hilfiger, whose bright pieces we coveted , but our parents refused to pay for.

 Or the 1984 episode when Theo and his siblings performed Ray Charles’ 1958 hit “The Right Time” for Cliff’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.

Back in the day, children in Black families performed dances and skits for parents and grandparents as after-dinner entertainment on Sundays, birthdays, and holidays. That year my mother choreographed a song and dance routine with my sister and I, singing Deniece Williams’ “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” for my dad’s 42nd birthday.

I was 10 and my sister was 7, just a year older than Rudy.

Warner’s death has hit so many of us who grew up in that era in New York, Philly — and beyond. Every other post on my social media timelines is in his memory.

“Once Theo started coming into his own … going to high school, caring about what people thought, obsessing about fashion, I really started to relate to him,” said Mister Mann Frisby, a 50-year-old Philadelphia writer, pop-culture expert, and events coordinator.

“When we saw Dr. Huxtable and Theo sitting together on the couch eating a hoagie with a soda and a bag of potato chips, I thought this was so Philly, so South Philly. I mean, I was doing the same thing Theo was in the same moment he was doing it.”

Theo’s gold-rimmed glasses, baggy jeans, and African print vests made him look like he walked out of a hip-hop video. In real life, Warner did too. That made him even more relatable.

He went from dweeb to dancing machine in the video for Whodini’s 1986 single “Funky Beat.” In the early ’90s, he directed videos for R&B and hip-hop heartthrobs including New Edition’s “Heartbreak” and Special Ed’s “I’m the Magnificent.” In 2015, Warner won a Grammy for a spoken-word performance with Robert Glasper and Lalah Hathaway.

“Malcolm Jamal-Warner was aspirational,” said Mark Tyler, 58, a historiographer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and former pastor of Mother Bethel. He, like Theo, got an earring in his ear and hid it from his parents as long as he could.

“In Whodini’s video he was doing all the current dances at the time, but he was doing it as himself. He was the kind of guy who gave us the best of who he was on his own terms.”

Thirty-three years since The Cosby Show’s season finale, losing Warner was a hard lesson in loss I wasn’t ready to learn. Now when I watch the show, I’ll cry remembering my childhood and grieving the loss of the heroes who made it so sweet.